New Distribution Capability (NDC) is a travel industry-supported program launched by International Air Transport Association (IATA) for the development and market adoption of a new, extensible markup language (XML)-based data transmission standard. NDC Shopping schemas enable airlines to distribute their full product offers and to merchandize their baggage, seat choices and ancillary services.
Enterprises, particularly those in the travel industry that use revenue management (RM) systems (RMS), use systems that create offers (a combination of price and/or product elements and/or services) to give to a customer, e.g., pricing and other product stipulations that combine to create an “offer” to that customer from that market segment based on what “market segment” the customer belongs to at the time of each purchase.
The classification of “market segment” can be something the customer knows they belong to (like a member of a group or demand from a certain sales channel or demand at a certain time), or the classification of a “market segment” and inclusion of customers in that defined “market segment” may be created by a forecasting model, where the segment and its members are created by the forecasting model and are not attributes the customer is aware of. When a customer buys an airline ticket the customer is usually not aware of what “market segment” the forecast model places the customer in because the placement into a particular “market segment” is based on both the customer's behavior at the time of purchasing that ticket and the airline's RMS which is creating continual forecasts and re-segmentations of demand. When the customer purchases another ticket the segment the customer belongs to is determined by the customer's behavior at that time and by the logic used by the forecasting system to define that market segment in its demand forecasting models. The “individual” is not a concept used by these systems other than the fact that customers belong to segments based on their behavior or attributes at the time each purchase is made.
Because these existing offer systems use “market segment” based attributes to group customers together and anonymously forecast demand and to determine the offer each member of the segment will receive, these systems are not able create individual offers.